WASHINGTON - Legislation authorizing crude exports advanced through another congressional panel on Thursday with a mostly party-line vote that underscored some senators' deep skepticism of making a big trade policy change to benefit oil producers without new environmental safeguards or taxes.

A dozen Republicans and one Democrat on the Senate banking committee voted to approve the measure, which is backed by oil producers.

"If there is a realistic opportunity to get something like this passed, it's going to require a more comprehensive approach," Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said. "There are environmental issues to be dealt with, there are jobs issues and, honestly, there are revenue issues as well that could be part of the mix."

The panel ultimately voted 13-9 to approve an oil exports bill authored by North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, the only Democrat to cross party lines and join the 12 Republicans for it.

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But passage came at a cost. The committee added a provision to require Iran to use proceeds from a nuclear deal to compensate terrorism victims who have won U.S. court rulings against the country. The language, sponsored by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., was adopted 13-9, despite Heitkamp's warning that it is a "poison pill" that could bring down the whole bill.

Kevin Book, with D.C.-based ClearView Energy, said the Iran amendment virtually guarantees that the exports bill "will not survive on the Senate floor, where Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated that they have at least 41 votes necessary to protect President Obama's Iran deal."

Biofuels plan spurned

The committee rejected other amendment efforts, including a plan by Toomey to gut the nation's biofuels policy by spiking a requirement for refiners to blend traditional renewable fuels into gasoline.

Two measures from Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., also were defeated. One would have delayed the effective date of the export ban repeal until the Government Accountability Office studies potential job losses from the change. The other would have postponed oil exports until the U.S. produces enough crude to satisfy domestic demand.

"The United States is nowhere close to breaking its dependence on foreign crude oil," Menendez said, noting that the nation imported about 7 million barrels of oil per day last year.

"I don't think that any American thinks that the idea of creating energy independence is to drill more federal land and water so we can take it and export it abroad," he said. "I think Americans would be appalled to know that we're considering exporting U.S. oil at a time that we're still reliant on foreign oil - to know that instead of investing in U.S. refineries and creating good-paying jobs at home, we are considering a policy that would send those jobs to refineries overseas."

Export advocates counter that some imports of foreign oil are locked in to supply domestic refineries that demand some heavy crude, not just the lighter variety flowing out of most U.S. fields.

Also, "28 percent of U.S. refining capacity is owned by foreign interests who will always import heavy sour oil produced and imported from their own country," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said.

Second approval

This is the second time a Senate committee has approved legislation authorizing widespread crude exports, going beyond limited amounts allowed now to Canada and from California and Alaska. The Senate energy committee approved a similar bill earlier this year.

The House is expected to vote on its own legislation, a bill by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, next week. New television advertisement airing in selected markets around the country aim to pressure Democratic lawmakers to support the bill. In Houston, the campaign, launched by a coalition of oil producers, targets lawmakers Sheila Jackson Lee and Al Green.

Heitkamp, whose state of North Dakota is home to the Bakken Shale, cast the policy change as a matter of fairness. Current law allows widespread exports of refined petroleum products, such as gasoline and diesel, even though raw, unprocessed crude is mostly blocked from foreign sales.

"If we're really talking about controlling an exported product so we can control the price at the pump, then why are we exporting refined product?" Heitkamp asked. "We're trying to control the raw material, but the entity that's actually being used by consumers has full access to whatever market it wants to find, whether it is in a friendly European country or otherwise."

Studies by academics, think tanks and government agencies suggest exports could modestly raise the price of U.S. oil while keeping domestic gasoline prices about the same or slightly lower, since they tend to track the cost of an international crude benchmark.

Skeptical of Big Oil

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said she is skeptical of those reports, largely because of the oil interests aggressively pushing to liberalize crude trade.

"The most obvious effect of lifting the crude oil export ban would be to produce enormous profits for a number of big oil companies," she said, "and that is a reason by itself to be skeptical of study after study and expert after expert that have been funded by Big Oil to try and sell this deal."

Some Democrats have floated combining oil exports with other energy provisions, such as renewable energy programs, ending tax incentives for the sector or imposing a new per-barrel production tax to fund highways and other infrastructure.

The deal-making talk continued Thursday, as Warner touted a more comprehensive approach and Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana indicated they wanted to see a move to protect refinery jobs as part of any bid to authorize exports.